Retired judge breaks silence on mother's murder conviction

Deborah Snow

THE recently retired judge who presided over the 2010 trial of former Australian water polo player Keli Lane, found guilty of murdering her baby daughter Tegan, has spoken for the first time outside court about his doubts over the conviction.

Former Supreme Court justice Anthony Whealy said the case had troubled him because the baby's body had never been found, making it a ''difficult case for the Crown to prove'', and because ''it did not make sense to me for a mother to do that''.

He says the case had been ''such an emotional, harrowing trial, that I really felt at the end I could do no more. I felt worn out from it and I suppose just emotionally affected by it.'' At its conclusion, he told then chief justice Jim Spigelman he wanted to retire but was offered a promotion to the Court of Appeal, where he remained before retiring in June this year. Lane came before him on the charge of murdering Tegan in August 2010. The alleged killing had happened 14 years earlier but no trace of a body was found. Lane, the daughter of a retired policeman, had been on course to become a water polo star, with dreams of Sydney Olympic glory. But she had a dark secret.

As the trial progressed, evidence emerged that she had had multiple pregnancies in the 1990s, two ending in termination and two in adoption. The fifth, resulting in the birth of Tegan, posed the deepest mystery. Lane had left the hospital with the infant two days after giving birth on September 12, 1996, and had resurfaced a short time later at a friend's wedding. In between Tegan had seemingly vanished. Despite the many missing pieces of the puzzle, the jury found Lane guilty in December 2010.

Mr Whealy says the Crown prosecutor, Mark Tedeschi, presented a powerful case. ''But it wasn't without its gaps, as I saw it. I wasn't, for myself, convinced that the Crown had proved its case. It wasn't my call, it was the jury's call, so my task was to try and make sure that the jury gave the woman a fair trial.''